3.4. Meeting Minimum Hardware Requirements

Once you have gathered information about your computer's hardware,
check that your hardware will let you do the type of installation
that you want to do.

Depending on your needs, you might manage with less than some of the
recommended hardware listed in the table below. However, most users
risk being frustrated if they ignore these suggestions.

A Pentium 4, 1GHz system is the minimum recommended for a desktop
system.

Table 3.2. Recommended Minimum System Requirements

Install Type

RAM (minimum)

RAM (recommended)

Hard Drive

No desktop

128 megabytes

512 megabytes

2 gigabytes

With Desktop

256 megabytes

1 gigabyte

10 gigabytes

The actual minimum memory requirements are a lot less than the numbers
listed in this table. Depending on the architecture, it is possible to
install Debian with as little as 20MB (for s390) to 60MB (for amd64).
The same goes for the disk space requirements, especially if you
pick and choose which applications to install; see
Section D.1, “Disk Space Needed for Tasks” for additional information on disk
space requirements.

It is possible to run a graphical desktop environment on older or
low-end systems, but in that case it is recommended to install
a window manager that is less resource-hungry than those of the
GNOME or KDE desktop environments; alternatives include
xfce4, icewm and
wmaker, but there are others to choose from.

It is practically impossible to give general memory or disk space
requirements for server installations as those very much depend on
what the server is to be used for.

Remember that these sizes don't include all the other materials which
are usually to be found, such as user files, mail, and data. It is
always best to be generous when considering the space for your own
files and data.

Disk space required for the smooth operation of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD system
itself is taken into account in these recommended system requirements.
Notably, the /var partition contains
a lot of state information specific to Debian in addition to its regular
contents, like logfiles. The
dpkg files (with information on all installed
packages) can easily consume 40MB. Also,
apt-get puts downloaded packages here before they are
installed. You should
usually allocate at least 200MB for /var, and a lot
more if you install a graphical desktop environment.